Personally I don't think I've ever looked up a health topic on Wikipedia; I use WebMD for that. Which isn't crowdsourced, I don't think -- I think they pay people to write the content on WebMD. Still, nice idea to offer college credit!

I found this as a fun video. T This video is in respect to today's (27SEP13) Google Doodle (or Game). It shows an individual changing the HTML in order to "Win" or achieve a higher score for the game itself. These steps can be done by anybody. However, I feel like this individual has too much time on their hands and could be putting their skills to better use.

This is the automatic tool that uncovered and erased Jonathan's test edit and probably Erin's too -- it's called STiki. It's not actually all the way automatic, though -- the page says "STiki is not a Wikipedia bot: it is an intelligent routing tool that directs human users to potential vandalism for definitive classification." So basically someone somewhere was probably spending some time looking through possible vandalism edits and decided not to keep some of the ones our class submitted.

Here's a tremendously engaging video of Clay Shirky giving the talk I just linked to about where people find the time to edit Wikipedia -- he thinks they probably stop watching TV. Which do you think is more productive?

Another great quote from this piece:

"So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought. And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television."

In response to the person who said in class that people who edit Wikipedia "have a lot of time on their hands" -- see this 2008 piece by Very Smart Guy and NYU professor Clay Shirky, who points out that editing Wikipedia is a more productive use of time than watching TV. Which, somehow, a lot of people also seem to have a lot of time to do.

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"I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years.""